Posts Tagged ‘handwriting’

On any given day, from her home on the Isle of Man, Linda Watson might be reading a handwritten letter from one Confederate soldier to another, or a list of convicts transported to Australia. Or perhaps she is reading a will, a brief from a long-forgotten legal case, an original Jane Austen manuscript. Whatever is in them, these documents made their way to her because they have one thing in common: They’re close to impossible to read.

Watson’s company, Transcription Services, has a rare specialty—transcribing historical documents that stump average readers. Once, while talking to a client, she found the perfect way to sum up her skills. “We are good at reading the unreadable,” she said. That’s now the company’s slogan.

For hundreds of years, history was handwritten. The problem is not only that our ancestors’ handwriting was sometimes very bad, but also that they used abbreviations, old conventions, and styles of lettering that have fallen out of use. Understanding them takes both patience and skill…

As we puzzle it out, we might recall that it was on this date in 1659 that the first known check of the modern era was written. Early Indians of the Mauryan period (from 321 to 185 BC) employed a commercial instrument called adesha; Romans used praescriptiones; Muslim traders used the saqq; and Venetian traders used bills of exchange— but these were effectively either a form of currency or letters of credit. The 1659 draft– made out for £400, signed by Nicholas Vanacker, made payable to a Mr Delboe, and drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, scriveners and bankers of the City of London– was the first “check” as we came to know them. It’s on display at Westminster Abbey. (The world “check” likely also originated in England later in the 1700s when serial numbers were placed on these pieces of paper as a way to keep track of, or “check” on, them.)

Between 2010 and 2014, archeologists digging in London’s financial district, on the site of a new British headquarters for Bloomberg, made an astonishing discovery—a collection of more than four hundred wooden tablets, preserved in the muck of an underground river. The tablets, postcard-sized sheets of fir, spruce, and larch, dated mainly from a couple of decades after the Roman conquest of Britain, in A.D. 43, straddling the period, in the reign of Nero, when Boudica’s rebellion very nearly got rid of the occupation altogether. Eighty of them carried legible texts—legible, that is, to Roger Tomlin, one of the world’s foremost experts in very old handwriting…

As we put the curse in cursive, we might send terrifically-legible birthday greetings to Ottmar Mergenthaler; he was born on this date in 1854. Known as “the second Gutenberg,” he invented the linotype machine– the first device that could easily and quickly set complete lines of type for use in printing presses. It so revolutionized the art of printing, that Thomas Edison called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris’s rendering of the signing of the Mayflower Compact. Each person to hold this quill would have done so in a way suited to their gender, occupation, and maybe even their hometown.

In colonial America, “the very style in which one formed letters was determined by one’s place in society,” writes historian Tamara Thornton in Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Thanks to the rigorous teachings of professionals called “penmen,” merchants wrote strong, loopy logbooks, women’s words were intricate and shaded, and upper-class men did whatever they felt like. So different were the results, says Thornton, that “a fully literate stranger could evaluate the social significance of a letter… simply by noting what hand it had been written in.”

Understanding how colonists put pen to paper means understanding why they wanted to write in the first place…

As we consider cursive, we might recall that it was on this date in 1780 that New Englanders awoke to find a murky haze drifting over the morning sun. An early twilight descended over the next few hours, and by noon, the skies had turned as black as midnight. Night birds sang and confused chickens retired to their roosts. People were forced to light candles to see.